Well here I sit in the Airport in Olbia awaiting my flight to Rome. The regatta is over and I again must leave one of the most beautiful places I have ever sailed. This is my second time here and I cannot wait to come back again next season!
The regatta is amazing! The organizers did a bang up job of putting together great racing, great parties and also great logisitics for this event. Audi as a sponsor stepped up and provided an opportunity to mix superstars that they sponsor with each team for the Coastal race on Saturday and the guest had a great time seeing what sailing was all about.
Our Rockstar was cross country skiing gold medalist Pietro Piller Cotter. Pietro helped the home county Italians win the 4 X 10 KM relay in the 2006 Winter games in Torino! Pietro is a great guy who had never sailed before but had some much fun that he came back with us on Saturday to finish the regatta! I do see a sailboat in his future!
Anyway back to the racing. As mentioned on Saturday we did a Coastal race. The race was only 16 miles for the Swans as the wind was quite light and we needed to finish in time for the Gala dinner at the YCPR. We had a great start, punched out at the pin end. Sailed out just short of lay line, tacked over to port and crossed the whole fleet! There really is not much like that first tack onto port and seeing the picture window below the boom, with you crossing the entire fleet!
We rounded the top about 4 boat lengths ahead of our "friends" on Atlantica. Well as they say, little details can derail a big effort and that is exactly what happened. We had a screw up in the set and that allowed three boats to catch up and roll over us, to the point where we had to gybe early in order to not get trained by the whole fleet.
Well going right downwind never work all week and this time was no different. This made of a long race in the mental up and down game. We finished 12th. It was really a huge blow to the team who had worked very hard at giving us in the back of the boat good crew work. The situation also was not helped by the fact that we were now sailing on a course that allowed for no new tactical opportunities to claw our way back to a more respectable finish.
Saturday was again welcomed with a sunny sky and light wind, in fact no wind at all. So we had a dock postponement for a couple hours. When we started to head to the racing area it looked real promising to get a good race off. Well the wind died forcing the RC to postpone again. About 15 minutes before the cut off time we got the last race off. One general recall later we were off.
Again Bill, Tea and Guinness had a great start down by the pin. We sailed very well, (again we now have speed!!!), up the first beat and rounded the top in 5th place. Johnny and I made a bad sail call for the run, choosing our A2 instead of the A1 and that cost us two places at that point. The second beat dealt really fluky conditions with boats just feet apart being in totally different wind strengths. This allowed a couple couple boats to get by and we rounded the last top mark in 9th place.
Bill and I saw a nice pressure lane off to left and decided to not do the standard gybe set like the rest of the fleet had done. We sailed lower and faster all way down the left side picking off one boat to finish the regatta with a very hard fought 8th place.
It is truly my opinion that our score card should have been all single digits for this event. We sailed better then it shows and we are getting our program together and we will continue to move up the leader board.
The next event is in Puerto Calebra in Lanzarote. It looks like it will be a great event and we will continue to work hard at getting better.
I will have a more technical debrief posted at some point this week. I am just burnt out right now and will have to way till I have my head sorted a little better!
Cheers
Tac
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